As soon as the Pain Elemental spits out its first Soul, run around to the other side of it so it’s between the Soul and you. The Soul now charges you, but hits the Elemental because it’s in the way. The Elemental now regards that Soul as its target, and “attacks” it, by spitting out another Soul in its direction (i.e., away from you). Now, there are two Souls who try to charge you, and run into the Elemental in their way, etc. When the occasional Soul gets through, or after the Elemental explodes, chainsaw them (it helps to be backed up down a narrow corridor, here).
No, this isn’t the only way to kill Pain Elementals. They’re not exactly difficult. But it is the most fun.
The reason is because of consoles and their craptastic controls. They dragged the entire genre down to their standard. Consoles are actually good for third person controls, though.
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I bought the original Painkiller when it was on a Steam sale for something like $2 and played through the first few levels. It kinda felt like the sort of project someone would make for a high school class - the graphics are fugly and each level seems to be populated by only one type of monster (!) Didn’t really make me want to keep playing more.
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That’d be like playing the first couple levels of Doom and saying it’s boring because you just kill soldier dudes with a generic minigun.
The main thing I hated about PK was the absurd amount of enemies. You would go into some huge arena and literally fight for 5-10 minutes straight. And I think you often had to kill every single enemy before doors would unlock. Serious combat exhaustion. At least the guns were neat. I have fond memories of the ice shotgun.
The Serious Sam games also suffer that problem. I guess it’s better if you play co-op, but I never did.
The newest one I played had a good mix of urban, desert, and jungle. They do love their temples though. Then again, Half-Life takes place mostly in labs and rusted out industrial settings. And vents. Lots of vents.
Man I miss that computer. It was my family’s first and we had cool games like Wolfie and some Shark game, Concentration, and some weird/scary carnival game where everyone was evil or something. Man what was that game?
I felt the opposite. There’s no such thing as a “well done” portion of a game if I’m hating playing it. It might be technically well put together but it’s still a detriment to the game in my opinion.
I found HL2 to mainly be tedious. Too much time spent dorking around or riding boats/buggies and the story never engaged me. I started a thread about it at the time because I had heard only glowing things about it and couldn’t figure out what I was missing. The consensus opinion seemed to be “Well, you had to be there when it was new and none of this was done before”. Which would seem to say that it’s been done better since. It wasn’t all bad and I remember some good shooting matches in the game but I never finished it.
Combination of bitchin’ awesome FPS and 3-D platformer. Interesting ground hazard puzzles. Interesting weapons and powerups. LUDICROUS GIBS! (“Dafuq? Was that an eyeball flying past?”)
ETA: an example of an interesting weapon: the Flamewall, a flamethrower that tosses out a cone of fire (a wall of fire from the weapon expanding outward in a conical area of effect). Targets hit by the flame would catch fire for a moment and then be left a standing charred skeleton standing in its own ashes for a couple of beats… and then collapsing into a bonepile with a rather musical chiming of dry bones. COOL.
I did have a lot of love for Rise of the Triad. It had a bunch of Easter Eggs, especially on holidays. The characters on the opening screen would wear holiday themed clothes and so forth.
The original Unreal deserves a mention. The first person campaign is why I play FPS games. Its absurdly long, and as the progenitor of the first Unreal engine (with fractals for water!), it was magnificent. Levels were huge, the lighting was spectacular. I truly felt like I was in an alien world. A game like that had a lot of what I loved in FPS games. An interesting and diverse cast of enemies, a big environment, traps, cool weapons and a lot of them, and a story.
While I love HL2, I cannot stand a lot of the weapons, both in this game and the Modern Warfare or WW2 games. I don’t need 3 different types of assault weapons, or 2 shotguns or 2 pistols. I’m fine with the classics because they represent a diverse set of options of me to meet my killing needs. I only need 1 pistol, one automatic machine gun, 1 shotgun, a rocket launcher (one that is not nerfed to the extreme), and some weirdo weapons. I really hate the Call of Duty games because they have a bunch of similar weapons that don’t even have names but model numbers and they’re all kind of the same.
You don’t mean the original then, since that was standalone and wouldn’t have been altered for holidays. The new one? But isn’t that also a standalone FPS?
Back then, standalone games did have holiday Easter eggs. The game shipped with all of the images, and if the system clock said it was a holiday, it would show the appropriate one.
And wasn’t Rise of the Triad the one that had the Louisville Slugger that fired baseballs?
The original Doom games are definitely up there, but its hard to say which FPS is ‘the best’ as taste differs.
Having recently played Doom 3 I will say that one thing Doom got right that later shooters tend to miss on, and its something very obvious, the weapons in Doom just felt satisfying to use, they somehow had a weight and feel that the weapons in Doom 3 for example totally lack. Doom 3 shotgun, chaingun etc felt like you were using a paper model of a weapon with underwhelming feedback and sound effects, the weapons in Doom were just viscerally satisfying to use.
In fact despite, or maybe because of, the lack of ‘up-down’ view and movement the controls of Doom in general felt better than later FPS games.
I’m not sure why people say Doom should be played with a keyboard alone, like all FPS games its better with a mouse (right-mouse button to move forward, left-mouse button to shoot, of course)
Parse the mechanics of games all you want. Bioshock Infinite STUCK with me. I found the world, story and characters utterly mesmerizing. Truly video game as art. I thought about it for months after.
